Best American Poetry 2017 Read online

  ready to die & go to hell.

  Do you know the Egyptians

  had temples filled with dog bones

  stacked in rows along stone walls?

  I can understand mummified

  crocodiles predicting rainfall,

  & even the sacred Nile ibis.

  They’re speaking about time.

  The gutted loot is long gone,

  but the bones confess.

  I still see Seneca ghosts

  because under my feet

  are talismans, blanched seeds

  & bones of extinct species,

  & paved-over shortcuts

  around these glass vaults,

  & you can forget the tab

  I dropped with Burroughs

  in ’79. They still believe

  I’m a torchbearer for one

  or the other, a tangle of thorns

  for the breastplate. My brain

  maybe lashed to the helm

  but I am still my own man.

  No one accuses me

  of tying silver bells

  on my hands & feet,

  & I don’t need eyes

  deliberately on me

  to breathe or talk

  with the crows

  at dusk. That lost river

  under a fallen bridge.

  How many votes do you think

  George Wallace received here

  on our enlightened East Coast

  stage? Not to ignore the South

  or the Midwest. Here I am

  talking history with you,

  but I should just stand here

  & gaze out this basement

  window, counting the shoes

  lamenting along the sidewalk.

  Yeah, there’s a basic rhythm

  in everything we do & think,

  whether it’s buying & selling

  magic, or talking a brother

  or sister down from a roof.

  Seldom a demigod wishes

  for John Cage’s silence,

  whether Germany or Alabama.

  That’s why the avant-garde

  blows against a void & nudges

  gods awake, to give body

  to soul as the highs & lows

  come together. I’m tired

  of questions accosting me

  in the streets, because Wallace

  still scares me in suburban light.

  He’d strut upon a puckish set

  of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  as Brutus, & leave as Hamlet

  with a boy’s grin on his face.

  He knew the rhythm of a day

  could bring a crowd to its feet.

  Sometimes people get tangled up

  inside themselves over a single word—

  noble or ennoble, whatever—a great

  difference when it comes to life

  or death. That pretty cashier

  Camille at the corner bodega

  she didn’t know a muskmelon

  from a cantaloupe, & kept saying,

  What do you call this so

  I can put it into the computer

  & it can tell us the price,

  & I said, This is a muskmelon

  darling, & she said, Well,

  I never heard it called that

  before, & don’t call me darling,

  & that’s when I said, Okay,

  to save your soul you can call

  this a cantaloupe & let me

  get outta here. You see

  I know a muskmelon

  by its rough skin, because

  that’s what my daddy called it,

  & I loved rubbing my fingers

  over it before my mama

  cut into it with a knife

  pulling the sun into our window,

  & she’d place the biggest slice

  on my blue rooster plate.

  from The American Poetry Review

  DANUSHA LAMÉRIS

  * * *

  The Watch

  At night, my husband takes it off

  puts it on the dresser beside his wallet and keys

  laying down, for a moment, the accoutrements of manhood.

  Sometimes, when he’s not looking, I pick it up

  savor the weight, the dark face, ticked with silver

  the brown ostrich leather band with its little goosebumps

  raised as the flesh is raised in pleasure.

  He had wanted a watch and was pleased when I gave it to him.

  And since we’ve been together ten years

  it seemed like the occasion for the gift of a watch

  a recognition of the intricate achievements

  of marriage, its many negotiations and nameless triumphs.

  But tonight, when I saw it lying there among

  his crumpled receipts and scattered pennies

  I thought of my brother’s wife coming home

  from the coroner, carrying his rings, his watch

  in a clear, ziplock bag, and how we sat at the table

  and emptied them into our palms

  their slight pressure all that remained of him.

  How odd the way a watch keeps going

  even after the heart has stopped. My grandfather

  was a watchmaker and spent his life in Holland

  leaning over a clean, well-lit table, a surgeon of time

  attending to the inner workings: spring,

  escapement, balance wheel. I can’t take it back,

  the way the man I love is already disappearing

  into this mechanism of metal and hide,

  this accountant of hours

  that holds, with such precise indifference,

  all the minutes of his life.

  from The American Poetry Review

  DORIANNE LAUX

  * * *

  Lapse

  Poem beginning with a line from Gwendolyn Brooks

  I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer. I

  see the leaves turning on their stems. I am

  not oblivious to the sun as it lowers on its stem, not

  fooled by the clock holding off, not deceived

  by the weight of its tired hands holding forth. I

  do not think my dead will return. They will not do

  what I ask of them. Even if I plead on my knees. Not

  even if I kiss their photographs or think

  of them as I touch the things they left me. It

  isn’t possible to raise them from their beds, is

  it? Even if I push the dirt away with my bare hands? Still-

  ness, unearth their faces. Bring me the last dahlias of summer.

  from Plume

  PHILIP LEVINE

  * * *

  Rain in Winter

  Outside the window drops caught

  on the branches of the quince, the sky

  distant and quiet, a few patches of light

  breaking through. The day is fresh, barely

  begun yet feeling used. Soon the phone

  will ring for someone, and no one

  will pick it up, and the ringing will go on

  until the icebox answers with a groan.

  The lost dog who sleeps on a bed of rags

  behind the garage won’t appear

  to beg for anything. Nothing will explain

  where the birds have gone, why a wind rages

  through the ash trees, why the world

  goes on accepting more and more rain.

  from The Threepenny Review

  AMIT MAJMUDAR

  * * *

  Kill List

  1. At a certain distance, it looks like a poem.

  2. Transliterated, maybe, from the Arabic.

  3. Short lined.

  4. Short lived.

  5. At a certain distance, it reads beautifully.

  6. What its authors cultivate is anesthetic distance.

  7. Don’t think wreckage, think Brecht.

&
nbsp; 8. Warfare is the theater of detachments.

  9. At a certain distance, an angry emperor becomes a god.

  10. Distances are more certain now, thanks to satellites.

  11. From the desert here to the desert there: 7252.86 miles.

  12. At a certain distance, wing lights look like stars.

  13. Cars look like Hot Wheels.

  14. A human body looks like the stick figure in a game of Hangman.

  15. We guess and fill in the blank of each letter.

  16. When we make mistakes, line by line we construct the hanged man.

  17. The hanged man represents the guesser.

  18. The word in question may remain unknown at the end of the game.

  19. The word can be a thing or a place.

  20. Or a name.

  21. At a certain distance, a kill list could be any kind of list.

  22. Grocery.

  23. Things to Do.

  24. Top Ten.

  25. Bucket.

  26. When hanging a man, any distance between his body and the earth will suffice.

  27. Just so long as he cannot touch the ground by extending his feet.

  28. Like a thief on tiptoe stealing into airspace.

  29. The list is a poetic device much favored by the American poet Whitman.

  30. Whitman was the first to establish that a body can be sung electric.

  31. American prisons promptly switched to the electric chair.

  32. This gave way in some states to the lethal injection.

  33. Apparently, physicians wanted a piece of the execution business.

  34. At a certain distance, it looked like vaccination.

  35. In the same way two thousand volts looks like an orgasm.

  36. Or a seizure.

  37. Seizures, too, are of various kinds.

  38. Drugs can be seized at the border.

  39. Fugitives can be seized in motel rooms.

  40. By the collar, or failing that, the throat.

  41. Moments, too, can be seized.

  42. I seized this one, for example, to prepare a kill list in the form of a poem.

  43. A kill list, like a poem, bears the signature of its compiler at the bottom.

  44. After its lines are revised away, that one name will remain.

  45. Your eye, scanning from above, will focus on it.

  46. You will make certain assumptions about my ethnicity, my religion, my politics.

  47. At a certain distance, I admit, I do look like an Arab.

  48. Your pupils will constrict, like a Predator’s faced with a flashlight.

  49. I have been waiting here for you, on the floor of this room.

  50. As-salamu alaykum.

  from The Nation

  JAMAAL MAY

  * * *

  Things That Break

  Skin of a plum. Rotting tooth.

  Switches cut down by a child

  to lash a child’s legs.

  A siege does something like this

  against sturdy walls. The wrong rules.

  A dozen angel figurines flying

  from a balcony.

  Flailing fist. Splint.

  Forefinger and index,

  dislocated (not broken). One points

  to the left of a man

  and the rubbery thing inside quivers

  familiar. Raise your hand

  if you know how to do this.

  If enough hair fails to escape

  the pull of a drain and the drain

  sputters and fails to swallow water

  we will likely say it’s broken.

  Waves. Traffic lights.

  The craven infantry

  of roaches at the flick of a switch.

  Will—A child in a shrinking living room

  sitting more still than the father.

  from Ploughshares

  JUDSON MITCHAM

  * * *

  White

  1.

  Two years before I was born and less than five miles

  from my grandfather’s farm,

        somebody killed two women and two men,

  filled them with so many rounds

  the dead were hard to recognize—

            young black men, one a veteran

  just returned from the war,

  and two young black women, shot to death

                by a gathering of men

  as white as the Georgia senate,

  all persons unknown, or so testified

           the single witness, also a white man.

  Truman made a statement,

  the FBI came down. After seventy years,

               the case is still nowhere,

  and surely the killers are dead.

  But this is not about those who did it.

               This is not about justice.

  There will be no justice.

  It’s about us, me and my friends,

             the first generation raised white

  in that town after the massacre,

  allowed to cakewalk into adulthood,

              self-assured, but as unaware

  as cattle of what had happened. I didn’t know,

  somehow, until I was forty-five years old,

                 and this is a poem

  of dumb, sputtering astonishment

  at the ignorance of our lives—we who went

             to our churches and our homes

  and our history classes, where no one said a word,

  we who lived each day like blank pages,

            mistake after mistake after mistake

  in the history book.

  2.

  You think you so smooth, even blackface

  is okay for you. Go on then, fool.

            Look here: God is not mocked.

  Ticket or not, you will be on that train, and soon.

  And when you take that ride,

            you better put on your face right,

  wipe off the tarbaby

  that came too easy. And how about the way

            you talking right this minute?

  You better let that go, but you won’t.

  So keep it up, strut and hambone,

          buck and wing, pick a bale of cotton.

  You think you in the big house

  for a reason, but son, sometimes

           what looks like the sun coming up

  is the sun going down,

  the world has spun the other way.

            There is nothing else to do then

  but to turn your sorry ass around. You been going ahead

  backwards.

  3.

  So now you have something to say?

  You know who I mean.

         Now, when there’s a street in every town,

  often a back street that runs past

  pawn shops and liquor stores—

         named Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard?

  Now you have something to say? That is mighty white,

  now that nothing is required,

        nothing at all, to have coffee at the old place

  on the corner with the woman from Cameroon

  who runs your office. No refusal of service,

          no greasy crew crowded at the window

  to beat you both bloody when you leave, no

  proprietor with a pick handle

            telling you to get out, no sham law

  to look the other way, no church to preach

  the curse of Ham, no slurs in th
e air

             to keep you, too, in your place.

  You know who I mean. Back then, you might have been

  a frightened little white boy like me,

             or you might have been as cool

  as a ducktail—slow-riding by the café

  to spit out the window, rolling past

             in your glass-packed Chevrolet,

  playing that race music loud on the radio.

  4.

  On the notes showing the provenance, you’ll notice,

  only first names. That was the etiquette,

              and we hold to the old ways

  at the underground auction. This is the nose

  of a Carlton, this is the eyetooth of a Lucille,

                   now a charm

  for a girl’s bracelet.

  What we have here, in the original jars,

            are the knuckles and the genitals

  of a William. This is the big-toe watch fob of an Odell.

  Here is the polished kneecap

            of a Randolph, a family keepsake

  engraved with the date. Let me be clear, though:

  To consider what any of this, or all of it,

                might bring at auction

  is evidence of a bad misunderstanding. When has anyone

  paid a thing?

  from Cave Wall

  JOHN MURILLO

  * * *

  Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,

  I think first of two sparrows I met when walking home,

  late night years ago, in another city, not unlike this—the one

  bird frantic, attacking I thought, the way she swooped

  down, circled my head, and flailed her wings in my face;

  how she seemed to scream each time I swung; how she

  dashed back and forth between me and a blood-red Corolla

  parked near the opposite curb; how, finally, I understood:

  I spied another bird, also calling, his foot inexplicably

  caught in the car’s closed door, beating his whole bird